by Nina Bawden
‘Perhaps he couldn’t.’
‘They all say that. Oh, you get all sorts in here. I often drop in when I’m out doing my bit of shopping. Nice and warm and takes the weight off your feet. Gives you a bit of interest, too.’ She smiled at me again. Assuming, perhaps out of delicacy, that my purpose was the same as hers, she said, ‘You’ll find Court One’s the best, dear.’
I was called at ten past eleven. I took the oath, reading from the card the pleasantly smiling policeman held out to me, and looked at the magistrate who smiled too. He was a round, little man with a face like a good apple. Gold-rimmed pincenez perched on his short, stubby nose. He said, in a soft, precise voice, ‘It is extremely good of you to come here, Mr Grant. What would you like to tell us?’
I had never been in a police court before and this gentle courtesy was not what I had expected. I don’t know what I had expected, now I come to think of it, but certainly not this curiously hospitable atmosphere.
Reassured, I glanced at Jay for the first time and immediately doubt swept over me.
He looked so – absolutely villainous. He was sitting beside Edward Jones in a sort of rabbit-hutch enclosure opposite the magistrate’s raised desk. His head was sunk slightly forward. One eye was completely closed, the lid swollen, purplish and veined with red. The lapel of his jacket had been ripped almost quite away. Jones’s appearance was tidier as his head, or at least the side I could see, was enclosed in a bandage. But they looked I thought with distant despair – distant, because my cold seemed to have cocooned my mind in a fuzz of cotton wool – a pretty pair of thugs.
The magistrate prompted me gently. ‘Mr Grant, I understand you know Mr Nbola and, though you were not a witness to the disturbance, you were present at an incident earlier in the evening.’
‘Yes, sir.’ My voice was hoarse and almost inaudible. He leaned forward, cupping his hand behind his ear and nodding thoughtfully from time to time. He asked me two questions.
‘What did you say was written on the wall?’
I was sure he had heard me the first time but I told him again. He turned down the corners of his mouth and sat silent for a moment before he glanced at the plain-clothes policeman beside him and repeated the phrase with the sarcastic relish of a schoolmaster playing to the gallery. I suppose he couldn’t resist it but as soon as he had spoken he frowned as if castigating himself for this lapse of taste and fixed his eye coldly on a young policeman who had tittered by the door.
He asked me quickly, ‘You’re sure Nbola did not hurt the boy?’
‘Yes. He shook him, but not hard. He frightened him, that’s all. I.…’
I was gathering momentum. Now I had seen what Jay looked like, I estimated his predicament as more serious than I had imagined before and was prepared to make a long speech in my faint, almost vanishing voice, about the length of time I had known him, his achievements, his character and so forth.
But the magistrate had heard all he wanted.
‘Thank you so much, Mr Grant,’ he said with his charming, old-fashioned politeness and I was dismissed as authoritatively as if he had bellowed like a regimental sergeant-major.
I left the box and sat down on the public benches by the side of a very old man who appeared to be fast asleep: from time to time a short, barking snore shook him awake. He looked round with surprise, blinked, and sank into sleep again.
The magistrate picked up what looked like a small penknife from his desk and fiddled with it ineffectively. He said, to the plain-clothes policeman, ‘This doesn’t look very dangerous to me.’
The policeman smiled deferentially. ‘If you’ll just press that button – shall I show you, sir?’
‘No, let me do it,’ the magistrate said with a faint snappishness. He fiddled with the thing again; when the flick knife shot out it made him jump, then he smiled beatifically, like a boy, and nodded.
He looked at the prisoners, who stood up. He said, ‘Jones, since your son may well have given you a somewhat misleading account of Nbola’s behaviour towards him, I am prepared to believe you may have been under some provocation. But as you have appeared in this court before.…’
He glanced inquiringly at the clerk who said, ‘Five times, sir. Drunk and disorderly, drunk, drunk and disorderly.…’
The magistrate waved his hand.
‘You see, I cannot be lenient.’ He spoke amiably, rather as if he and Jones were discussing the mild misdemeanours of some common friend. ‘You will pay a fine of five pounds for drunkenness, fifteen pounds for a breach of the peace and twenty pounds for being in possession of an offensive weapon. I should also warn you that if you persist in drinking to excess you may one day injure someone seriously and find yourself in prison.’
‘Time to pay, sir,’ Jones said laconically, though his big hands were clasped tightly on the rail in front of him and his heavy shoulders looked strong and tensed as a bull’s.
‘Three months. Nbola, you will pay a fine of two pounds into the court immediately and I shall hope not to see you here again. You have told me Mr Jones is a friend of yours. I would suggest that you should be more careful about the company you keep in future and try to curb your chivalrous impulses. At least the physical expression of them. Do you understand me?’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,’ Jay said in a husky voice. He did not move until the policeman touched him on the arm.
Before I could leave, the court rose. I stood, while the magistrate gathered his papers and looked with frustration and misery at the clock. It was just after twelve. I had realized, while the magistrate was passing sentence, that although I couldn’t remember the name of Kunz’s hotel, I knew where it was – a turning off Piccadilly somewhere. In a taxi I would almost certainly be able to find it. If I could get a taxi, if the traffic wasn’t too bad. Even then I should be over an hour late.…
The first person I saw as I left the court was Thomas. He hurried towards me, hands outstretched.
‘I’m glad you managed to get here,’ I said in a thoroughly surly tone.
He beamed. ‘I have broken my neck to be on time. I was standing inside the door while you gave your evidence. You did well, Mr Grant. Each sentence succinct and to the point. I could hardly have done better myself.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. It was impossible to hold out against that monumentally well-meaning smile.
‘Although the outcome should really have been in no doubt, I confess I was worried. You and I, Mr Grant, know our friend to be a fine young man, fit to mix with the greatest in the land. But I had not thought the magistrate would be so discerning. He is a fine man, a man I would be proud to shake by the hand.’
The recipient of this honour appeared in the foyer, looking small and roundly mummified in a long overcoat and a striped knitted scarf that enveloped his face beneath his black Homburg hat. As I hurried to Jay who had just emerged from another door, I saw Thomas rumble down on him, like a tank.
Jay didn’t speak. He touched my hand briefly and looked at me with distressed, moist eyes. I asked him if he had the money for the fine. He nodded, he looked ill and cold. He had his raincoat over his arm; I hustled him into it and explained that I was in a hurry. I had an appointment – I hadn’t the heart to tell him I was late for it – and would need a taxi. Unless he was anxious to go with Thomas, I would drop him off at his house on the way.
We went towards the main door. Thomas and the magistrate were already there, the little man backing away with a furious, trapped looked on his face which had become so red that it looked raw. Thomas’s voice echoed back dankly from the tiled walls.
‘…a magnificent example of British Justice, sir. I am proud – yes, proud to have been present to observe it. I and my friends here cannot thank you enough. I only wish there was something I personally could do to show appreciation.’
He drew his hand out of his pocket. Stiff with horror, I wondered if he was going to offer him money. Surely even Thomas was aware that in England this was not normal practice? Appare
ntly the magistrate had the same thought. His eyes flashed such blistering anger that I was surprised Thomas did not recoil, as from a blinding light.
But he only offered his hand. ‘I wish to shake hands with you, sir,’ he said.
The magistrate’s face twitched. He looked at Thomas and for an appalling moment betrayed his helpless, physical aversion. It was something I had heard people talk of but never actually seen before. Then he put out his hand and touched Thomas’s, as if it were a toad.
Thomas said, ‘I will detain you no longer, sir,’ and bowed from the waist with a stiff, heavy dignity and I silently applauded: he was the victor in this encounter. Then, of course, he spoiled it. He added, ‘I had feared – I can admit it now – that colour prejudice, even in England, might possibly obstruct the course of justice.’
The little man was quivering. He said with controlled, icy wrath, ‘In England, sir, decent people do not allow their prejudices to interfere with their behaviour.’
And walked out, bantam-cock erect, diminished in one sense and not in another, which is usually the case with most people, most of the time.
Thomas turned to me. ‘I have my car, Mr Grant. I would be overjoyed to offer you a lift to your place of work.’
Thomas had a singular talent. He appeared, in the weeks he had been in England, to have mastered the map of London. Once we had dropped Jay who lived only a few streets away from the court and I had impressed on him the need for haste he drove like a cab driver. Like a fictional cab driver, that is, and one who was slightly mad. We must have switched directions twenty times in the first ten minutes surging down narrow back streets, in and out of neglected squares, scattering dogs, children; once we turned in to what seemed a garage workshop and emerged the other side, in a main street. His technical skill was enormous and yet he treated the car, it seemed to me, not like a machine but like an animal: as he backed out of one side road that was blocked by an unloaded lorry, you could almost feel the car’s haunches quiver as it gathered itself for the next leap forward.
It was a small car, and several years old. The springs had complained when he got into the driving seat. He was cramped there, thick and solid and lumpy, like a powerful piece of modern sculpture. His face streamed with sweat like runnels of water down the side of a mountain. His urgency transcended mine as did his distress, expressed in rolling, biblical phrases whenever we stopped at a traffic-light. He behaved as if we were rushing to a death bed; more, as if by getting to this hotel in good time we could avert some cosmic disaster. The terrible thing, the thing that by the end of our ride had begun to make me feel thoroughly small, was that his anxiety – his genuine anguish – was for me, on my behalf, and I was incapable of feeling as deeply as he assumed I did. I was worried, but beside his deep, shaking concern mine was a thin, febrile emotion, a foolish, trickling stream beside a deep river.
When we ran out of petrol crossing Waterloo Bridge, he almost wept. ‘This is terrible – terrible,’ he muttered as we stood on the pavement watching the hired cabs fly past, mopping his sodden forehead and waving his arms like an elephant practising semaphore. When one finally stopped he pounced on the door, thrust me through it and said to the driver, ‘This is a highly important matter. This gentleman is on high Government business.’
The driver raised his eyebrows as he flicked down his flag. As we sped away, I could see Thomas through the blue glass of the back window, standing mournfully hunched over his little car. His immense size made it look like a child’s toy, as if he could have lifted it with one hand.
At sixteen minutes past one, we got to Kunz’s hotel. It was Brown’s, which explains I suppose, in a Chestertonian way, why I had not remembered it. Kunz had gone. The receptionist was apologetic. Mr Kunz had regretted that his schedule was tight. He and the other gentlemen had left to catch a plane at two forty-five.
Kunz had left a note, friendly but cool. They had waited as long as they possibly could. He did so hope nothing unfortunate had happened to me. He was mine, sincerely.
There was a cab on the rank. We got to London Airport in time to see Kunz’s plane take off into the cold sky. At least, to satisfy my dramatic sense, I assumed it was Kunz’s plane. It might have been any plane, a heavy, silver bird setting off for Nassau, Tokyo, Bangkok – or simply the wide, blue yonder.
I asked the driver to wait and telephoned Louise to tell her I had spent a lot of money and probably lost the job.
Chapter Thirteen
‘You must be absolutely mad,’ Reggie said.
Or, rather, he didn’t say it. Not in actuality, anyway. But it was his hard, implacable tones speaking these words – and endless, sneering variants of them – that rang through my head all that long, cold afternoon; driving back from the airport, giving my lecture to the third year students and later, sitting at my desk miserably trying to compose a letter to Kunz that would steer a dignified course between justification and apology.
The harsh voice condemned me for my general lack of sense, initiative and normal go-getting aggressiveness, for my irresponsibility, for my peculiar inability to put first things first. Reggie marched my sins of impotence before me like malingerers on a sick parade. As advocate, I could only excuse them plaintively. It was hindsight that made my folly and stupidity more apparent in this instance than usually. Even without my intervention, Jay would have got off with a small fine. But I was not to know that, was I? All right. If I had to rush off to the police court to rescue this young fool, couldn’t I have asked if there was some way of giving evidence without being present? And how on earth could I have been so unutterably careless as to have forgotten Kunz’s telephone number? Why had I not thought to ring Hilton who would certainly have known it? I don’t know, I felt ill, I had a headache, I answered weakly and heard Reggie’s magnified, masculine snort of contempt roll round the tender balloon of my throbbing head.
Hilton was kind; embarrassed and regretful because I was, after all, his protegé, but kind. He understood perfectly how I had been placed but, in the circumstances, it was unfortunate. Kunz was not the best man to have let down in this fashion. Though an extremely nice man he was meticulous himself and inclined to be irritable when other people were more casual. But he would write to him. There were one or two things that he could perhaps say that I couldn’t. I had been overworking, of course, he had thought that for some time. Etc., etc.
This courteous, gentlemanly attempt to excuse and shield me made me feel guilty. As guilty as Louise’s outburst on the telephone had made me. ‘Oh, damn Jay, damn him,’ she had cried – though it was not that that suddenly made me feel guilty but the fact that she had apologized almost immediately and said of course she understood and she didn’t blame him, really, or me. What else could I have done? Her readiness to hide her natural disappointment started up shame in me; was I so touchy, so difficult, that she was afraid to let me see how she really felt? She was too gentle, too anxious to please. She lacked aggressiveness though Reggie, being an old-fashioned, Anglo-Saxon male would not condemn her for this. Women, in his view, were charming menials whose sole part was to be unaggressively bonny and buxom in bed and at board as the old marriage service had it.…
But was I any better than Reggie? Didn’t she often treat me in much the same nervous way that she treated him – as if we were a pair of ravening male beasts of uncertain temper? Look at that incident of the car this morning! Had I given her reason to think I might be ‘angry’ because it had a flat tyre? Of course I had. Memory supplied occasions eagerly – I was anxious to convict myself of swinishness – occasions when I had been pettily spiteful or deliberately cruel, working off on poor Louise not only sexual frustration but other frustrations that had nothing to do with her. I had often wanted to hit her and seen her flinch as if she knew it, as she flinched from Reggie who had often, when they were children, twisted her arm and pinched her (till she was black and blue, Julia had once told me, with an odd air of pride). My private, glorified image of myself as a gentle ch
aracter, the benign champion of the weak, the defender of the exploited, the opposer of violence, was only an hypocrisy. Even my vehemence against Reggie, my using him as a symbol of all I overtly affected to hate, was simply a refusal to recognize my own sadistic potential. Or did I attack him because I really wanted to be like him, because in my heart I believed that to ride rough-shod over people, to be competitive, decisive and domineering, meant you were a Man and not a tame tabby?
In the centre of all this wallowing there was a core of self-doubt like the plump kernel of truth in the middle of any wrinkled old platitude. I suppose I did sneakingly admire Reggie – or the type of man he stood for in my mind – if only because he seemed content to be no different from what he was. But if I had not been so inordinately depressed and beginning to be ill I would probably have told myself that men often did more harm than tame tabbies and that on the whole pretensions to virtue – or, at any rate, to virtuous behaviour because what counts, finally, is not what you are but what you do – were better than no pretensions at all.
But I was ill, I was depressed, in a black, self-hating, self-despising mood. If I had not been, things might have worked out differently.
To my surprise, Louise met me at the station. To my further surprise – how could she want to? – she kissed me quickly before she said, ‘Darling, you’re horribly late. I’ve been waiting ages. I’ve got to go and see Mother. She’s in bed with ’ flu. Some bug or other, anyway.’ She looked at me. ‘You don’t look too bright yourself. You take the car home. I’ll go by Tube.’
I protested, but she said the Tube was quicker anyway, opened the car door, took my brief-case from me and tossed it in the back. She didn’t, I noted gloomily, appear as crushed as my imagination had made her; ‘I’m sorry I was horrid on the telephone,’ she said. ‘Do you really think you won’t get the job now?’
‘I don’t know. It depends.’
